Once your website is LIVE on the internet it is a good idea to submit your website on various search engines such as Google Yahoo and Bing. This makes it easier for users who are looking to find a product or service that your business offers.

When I launched my first website I had no idea how to do this and asked my web designers to do it for me. 5 years on I have learnt to do this and am happy to share it with other small business owners who manage their own website or perhaps have just launched a new website and are keen to learn to do it on their own.

I assume you have got yourself a webmaster account for all the three search engines (Google Yahoo and Bing) and have added the website on through the ADD A SITE function. For those who don’t know Yahoo is now powered by Bing therefore you will need to only submit the sitemap to Bing for both the search engines to crawl your site.
Here is a step by step guide to adding your website sitemap on Search Engines-

STEP-1 Create a Sitemap-

To create a sitemap of your website please go to https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or http://www.web-site-map.com/. Both these sites work equally well but I will guide you through the process using the former.

    • Enter the URL of the website for which the Sitemap needs to be created. Make sure you add www before the domain name for the sitemap generator to work properly.
    • Change Frequency refers to how often will the content on a URL is changed. I usually leave it to None.
    • Last modification refers to the point of time when the URL was changed. I usually leave it on Use server’s response.
    • Finally priority refers to how important is the URL that you have entered as compared to other URL’s on the website.
    • Once you hit the Start button then you will be taken to another page and your request will be processed.

    • At the end of this process you will have a file available for download. I usually use the .xml file for uploading the sitemap on the websites FTP and then on to the Search Engine Webmasters.

    • When you hit the download button the Sitemap will now be available under the download section of your browser. Click on this file and it will appear in the browser.

STEP-2 Upload the Sitemap to your Website through the cPanel.

    • Now login to you cPanel and go to file manager.

    • When you click on the File Manager you will be asked to make a Directory Selection i.e. which directory would you like to access. Please select Public FTP Root (public_ftp).

    • Upon making a selection selection you will be taken to another screen where you will have directories and sub directories available on the left hand side of the screen. Double click on public_html.

    • Once you click on public_html a number of files will appear under this folder visible on the right side of your screen.

    • The next step will be to hit the upload button on the top and you will be taken to another screen where you can choose the file you want to upload.

    • Simply choose the sitemap.xml file that we had generated using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once you hit the upload button the file will be uploaded on to the directory and will appear on the right side with all other files in the folder.

Step 3- Submit your Sitemap to various search engines.

    • Login to your Google Webmaster Account and go to Sitemaps under Crawl on the left side of the Dashboard.

    • Hit the Add/Test Sitemap button on the right side of the screen and a new window will appear where you will manually enter the words sitemap.xml.

    • Once you hit the Submit Sitemap button the following screen will appear.

    • Now to submit the Sitemap to Bing and Yahoo log on to Microsoft Bing Webmaster and on the Dashboard you will see the Submit a Sitemap button under Sitemaps.

    • Hit the Button and a new window will appear where you will manually enteryou’re your domain name followed by sitemap.xml.

  • Once you have submitted the sitemap a Pending message will appear which means the crawlers will Index your site and add it on to the search engines shortly.

I hope this blog proves to be useful for you guys Should you have any questions or concerns please leave a message below.